The CTC you need to live in each Indian city

Every salary conversation in India happens in CTC, and CTC is the one number that tells you least about your life. It is a company's cost, not your income. By the time it reaches your bank account it has passed through employer provident fund, gratuity, your own provident fund, professional tax and income tax — and then it meets a rent that is three times higher in one city than another.

So the useful question is not what a good salary is. It is what CTC you need, in your city, to live normally and still save a fifth of what you take home. That number is not published anywhere, because working it out backwards requires running the tax rules in reverse. Below is that calculation, done for eight cities.

First, what a CTC actually becomes

Under the new regime for FY 2026-27, with Basic set at the common 50% of CTC, this is what lands in your account each month. Employer provident fund and gratuity are removed first because they were never yours to spend, then your own provident fund, professional tax and income tax come out.

• ₹6 lakh CTC → about ₹42,600 a month
• ₹9 lakh CTC → about ₹64,000 a month
• ₹12 lakh CTC → about ₹85,400 a month
• ₹15 lakh CTC → about ₹1,00,300 a month
• ₹18 lakh CTC → about ₹1,18,100 a month
• ₹24 lakh CTC → about ₹1,51,000 a month
• ₹30 lakh CTC → about ₹1,80,700 a month

Notice the step between ₹12 lakh and ₹15 lakh. Take-home rises by under ₹15,000 a month for ₹3 lakh more CTC, because that band is where the tax slabs bite hardest. A raise that looks large on the offer letter can arrive small.

The CTC each city actually asks for

Now run it backwards. Take rent for a one-bedroom flat in a commutable area, add ₹18,000 a month for the ordinary business of living — food, transport, phone, electricity, basics — and require that 20% of take-home is still left over and saved. That produces the take-home you need, and from the take-home, the CTC.

• Mumbai — rent ₹35,000 → you need ₹66,500 in hand → about ₹9.4 lakh CTC
• Bengaluru — rent ₹28,000 → ₹57,500 in hand → about ₹8.2 lakh CTC
• Delhi NCR (Gurugram) — rent ₹27,000 → ₹56,500 in hand → about ₹8.0 lakh CTC
• Hyderabad — rent ₹20,000 → ₹47,500 in hand → about ₹6.8 lakh CTC
• Pune — rent ₹20,000 → ₹47,500 in hand → about ₹6.8 lakh CTC
• Chennai — rent ₹18,000 → ₹45,000 in hand → about ₹6.4 lakh CTC
• Kolkata — rent ₹15,000 → ₹41,500 in hand → about ₹5.9 lakh CTC
• Indore — rent ₹12,000 → ₹37,500 in hand → about ₹5.4 lakh CTC

The gap is 1.74 times, and it is all rent

Mumbai asks for ₹9.4 lakh where Indore asks for ₹5.4 lakh. That is ₹4 lakh of CTC, or 1.74 times, for an identical standard of living and an identical savings rate. Nothing else in the calculation moved. Same tax rules, same essentials, same fifth put away. Only the rent changed.

This is the number to hold in your head when a company in Mumbai offers you 30% more than one in Pune. Thirty per cent does not cover it. On these figures the Mumbai offer has to be about 40% higher before you are equally well off, and that is before the commute, which costs time rather than money and is therefore easy to leave out of a spreadsheet and hard to live with.

The part almost nobody adjusts for

The old regime gave you an HRA exemption. Living somewhere expensive came with a partial tax discount, because a slice of your rent reduced your taxable income. The new regime does not have it. House rent allowance still appears on your payslip, but it no longer reduces your tax.

So the high-rent city has quietly become more expensive relative to the cheap one than it used to be. The rent went up and the tax relief that used to soften it went away. If your mental model of the city premium was formed a few years ago, it is now out of date in the wrong direction.

How to redo this for your own situation

The rent figures above are the assumption you should replace first, because they are the only thing here that is a judgement rather than a rule. Everything else is arithmetic.

• Take your actual rent, or the rent of the flat you would genuinely live in rather than the cheapest listing you can find.
• Add your real monthly essentials. ₹18,000 is a single person living carefully; a couple or anyone with a car will be well above it.
• Decide your savings rate. Twenty per cent is a reasonable floor for someone early in their career, not a target.
• Divide the total by one minus your savings rate. That is the take-home you need.
• Work back from take-home to CTC with the calculator, which applies provident fund, professional tax and the new-regime slabs for you.

Two things will change the answer more than anything else. If your company sets Basic below 50% of CTC, more of your package is special allowance, provident fund contributions fall and take-home rises slightly. And if you are supporting anyone else, the essentials figure stops being ₹18,000 long before you notice.

What the exercise is actually for

Not for deciding that Mumbai is unaffordable. Plenty of people live there on less than ₹9.4 lakh, by saving less, sharing a flat, or living further out. The point is that they are making that trade knowingly.

The failure this prevents is the quiet one: moving for a raise that looked large, absorbing a rent that looked survivable, and discovering two years later that the savings rate never recovered. The number was knowable on the day the offer arrived.